travelling shoes: twist festival 2022

 

back in 2019, i applied for festival twist, a yarn festival in rural québec that reminded me of my visit (also that year) to rhinebeck in new york state. tens of thousands of attendees come through in a weekend to enjoy sheepy textile goodness, complete with actual sheep! applications are always for the year in advance, and so of course when 2020 rolled around, we did not do the actual event (although like many others, they pivoted well into virtual offerings). hit fast forward to this year, and we finally had the opportunity to gather again in person. i learned a lot from my time prepping for and attending twist, and also just have to say this right off the bat - thank goodness i didn’t dip my toe into “big yarn fest” waters back in 2019! i was so much better prepared this year, and my business has grown significantly in the covid years, which allowed me to get a lot more useful data (i think, at least) for planning future years and events. i won’t spend too much more time on the more nerdy/boring aspects of business behind-the-scenes life, so let’s get to the good stuff!

if i had to describe twist in a short list of bullet points, i’d say:

  • it has one of the most accommodating and lovely organizing teams (including the venue staff!) i’ve ever had the pleasure of working with

  • fellow vendors and the diversity of what was on display and available for attendees were incredible

  • the crowds were super lovely even when we had language barriers at play (my franco-manitobain french is very rusty, and québecois is a different dialect with different slang)

  • the food in the papineau region where the festival is located is top notch!

  • the papineau region in general is stunningly beautiful - we drove past a waterfall leading to the red river every morning, and the land was full of dye and medicinal plants in full bloom

overall, i had an incredible time, made some new wholesale partners (check out rives compagnie and their super cool online sewing classes!), restocked with others (la bobineuse is all set for your autumn knitting!), connected with old and new friends, and seriously cannot wait to go back again next year.

it was also so gratifying to finally see my yarns laid out in a single perfect gradient for each base, with roots of course taking up the majority (literally) of the booth’s stage. so much of my time is spent dyeing yarn by myself and then storing it in bins, and i almost never get the opportunity to see it all out together at once. my doppelgänger and good friend, kalea, was my booth mate, and she rearranged the gradient three times because she knew it made my ocd happy. it also made festival attendees happy, because the most common comment we received was a gasp followed by “quelles belles couleurs!”

kalea runs luddite yarn out of edmonton, and if you’ve bought roots flock or pasture dk, you have kalea to thank for that. while she’s also a designer and natural dyer, a very large portion of her business is actually developing custom yarn bases using canadian fibres and spun at canadian mills. she specializes in heritage breeds and literally goes out to farms to work with farmers on shearing day, selects the fleeces (and helps the farmers to improve their wool quality year over year), skirts the hundreds of pounds of raw dirty wool by hand, and drives it to whichever mill can make the kind of yarn she’s determined it will become. generally, that’s custom woolen mills for the non-sock yarns and a mini mill for the sock yarns. even with slavic sock, our newest all-natural sock yarn base, i mailed her a fleece given to me by ingrid (the same farmer who provides our hand-tanned sheepskins) so she could work with it and determine whether it would be a good option for sock yarn before it got sent to long way homestead for spinning. slavic sock should be back from the mill in the next couple of months, by the way, and you can pre-order it undyed or dyed with homegrown plants in the shop.

this was also my first time travelling since before covid, and also my first time at an event so large, and so of course there were a lot of lessons to learn. here’s another quick list (feel free to apply them yourself to relevant experiences):

  • do your best to not go into events like this in burn out mode (we’ll work on that for next time…)

  • get a lot of good sleep

  • eat nutritious food as much as possible and indulge in local food

  • connect with friends

  • don’t go in with crazy expectations and you’ll be able to enjoy things as they roll out

  • don’t try to do everything by yourself

  • be grateful for the help you receive

  • stretch your body and take breaks as needed (and remind your friends to do the same)

  • it is possible to attend giant events and travel by air without catching covid - wear your good masks, wash your hands a lot, sanitize surfaces (especially on the plane), and do your best to keep your immune system up to snuff by following the above advice

if you’ve read this far, here are some of my recommendations for things to do in the area if you visit us at twist in a future year:

some final notes from my time at twist…

…we never could have handled this year without the incredible help of our booth companion and kalea’s friend, caroline. she’s an absolute gem.

…get yourself a wool blanket from my pals amanda and alberta from prado de lana. we traded yarn for a blanket and i literally wrapped myself in it like a cocoon and stood in my booth like that was a totally reasonable thing to do in the middle of crowds.

…i came home with soft-as-a-cloud baby alpaca from une maille à la fois (from FRANCE! and i thought i traveled a long way…) who distributes quechua alpaca. i’m thinking wee cedar?? how adorable would that be? the yarn’s a little on the light side, but if i knit up a size it’ll fit a smaller kiddo. and at this point my own sprouts are all imaginary anyway, so there’s no specific size i need it to be ha.

…thank goodness for my good friend julie asselin, who spent the weekend hyping up everyone, providing fellow vendors with tasty cookies, and lending out her neck massager. also, she sells very lovely yarns.

 
travelling shoesash alberg